Emoticons have become a staple for African mobile phone users, just as they have in the rest of the world. But anybody who has tried to say “please, don’t make me laugh” with an an emoji will know a bright yellow smiley is not always up to the job. A new range of emoticons aimed squarely at Africans aims to solve that problem.

His newly launched line of emojis – which sit in his app, Afroemojis – features men and women dressed in colourful African clothes, and local expressions in pidgin English, such as “Chai!” (“Wow!”), “Correct!” (“Great job!”) and “No dulling!” (“Don’t be slow!”).

Impressed by the high adoption rate that mobile phones have enjoyed across the African continent, he wanted to create an app that responded to the rapidly changing way Africans are communicating with each other, both at home and abroad.

“This is basically ‘send me an African-looking image’, right? But I think the evolution of apps and cellphones is going to get a lot more localised.

The mobile phones that Africans use have typically been designed and built in California or South Korea, and often the apps that run on them don’t engage directly with African users – leaving a gap that Mr Daramola is trying to exploit with Afroemojis.

And although his company is based in the US, he says Afroemojis is an African enterprise.

“It’s a business and at the end of the day you do have to make a return on your investment,” he says.

“But you know, you hear this about Africa, you hear the other about Africa – but actually capturing things like this and making it look this good, it’s just a step in the right direction for Africa as a whole.

“It’s a good technological step to show that we’re not just dependent on everything else created outside of Africa. But we can actually do it from inside.”

Image copyrightiManagement Consulting

As important as the images, is the African-English slang Mr Daramola’s emoticons use.

His hope is that Africans will prefer to use a character that says “Any better?”, rather than one that asks “Anything good for me?”.

And while the 50 characters currently available are predominantly West African, he wants to expand the range of emojis to reflect different African cultures.

Mr Daramola’s hope is that millions of people will use and share his emoticons. But that may take a while.

So far, he says, the app has had about 5,000 downloads on android, and on iOS, which is far less widespread in Africa, about 2,000.

“We just launched,” he says, “so it’s to just watch it actually grow over time.”

FEW places still capture the romance (and frustration) of the early days of flight quite as Africa does. Although air travel in the continent is safer and more common than ever before (see page 53), it still has some charming anachronisms. In Nigeria everyone applauds when the plane touches down. On tiny propeller-driven planes in Botswana the cabin attendants hand you a little bag of biltong, the dried meat that once fed people on long overland treks. In Tanzania, where on some flights almost half the passengers are taking to the skies for the first time, many of the faces in the cabin betray a sense of wonder tinged with fear.

Yet African airlines feel like a prop-blast from the past in regrettable ways, too. In most places, schedules are about as reliable as they were when planes could take off or land only in clear weather. Tickets are costly. Routes are convoluted: a passenger wanting to fly from Algiers to Lagos may have to go via Europe, turning a four-and-a-half-hour journey into one that takes at least nine hours. Most airlines are state-owned and protected from competition. Like a lot of national carriers elsewhere, they tend to be chronically unprofitable and to need frequent bail-outs from taxpayers.

Across Africa, airlines wanting to fly new routes from one country to another need the agreement of both governments first. Getting this can take years of lobbying and, in some cases, bribes. If the airline is not owned by one of the two states, its chances of winning permission nosedive. Fastjet, a London-listed low-cost carrier with operations across Africa, had to wait three years for a green light to fly between Tanzania and neighbouring Kenya. Zimbabwe recently announced that it would not let any airline besides its national carrier fly from Harare to London—although Air Zimbabwe does not currently service this route, for fear that as soon as its planes land they will be impounded by creditors.

Closed markets carry jumbo-sized costs. It is not just that badly run African state airlines lose money ($300m last year, or $3.84 for every airline ticket sold on the continent). Far bigger are the opportunity costs. Lousy air links inhibit trade, exports and investment. In many parts of the world air travel grows about twice as fast as GDP. In Africa it has been expanding by about 5% a year, which is slower than the 6% or so that economic growth has averaged over the past decade.

The lesson from other parts of the world is that when markets are freed, fares fall. This stimulates a huge increase in air travel and gives a boost to all the businesses that depend on mobility. In African countries that have liberalised a bit, this has indeed happened: after a bilateral open-skies deal, fares between South Africa and Zambia fell by almost 40% and passenger numbers rose nearly as much. After Morocco opened its market to European airlines in 2005, the number of passengers jumped by 160% and the number of routes more than tripled, from 83 to 309 in eight years.

A study commissioned by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), a club of big airlines, estimates that if just 12 of Africa’s bigger economies opened their skies to one another, fares would fall by more than a third and traffic between them would soar by 81%, to roughly 11m passengers. More than 155,000 new jobs would be created, and $1.3 billion would be added to GDP. This may well be an underestimate, given Africa’s vast size and sparse, shoddy road network, which is about a fifth as dense as the world average and mostly unpaved. Where air travel expands, so do unexpected new industries, such as growing roses in Kenya for export to Europe.

Fly freedom

In 1988 most African governments signed up to the Yamoussoukro Declaration, pledging to open their skies. To date not one has done so fully (although some, such as South Africa, have opened up a lot). Rather than encouraging competition, most African leaders seem more concerned with mollycoddling their bust national carriers. This provides jobs for pals and jets that can be commandeered for presidential shopping trips to Paris. But it is terrible for Africa. The continent will struggle to take off economically while its people are stuck on the runway. Time to let Africans fly.

PRAIA/LONDON (Reuters) – Florzinha Amado is eight months pregnant and trying to stay calm about whether the Zika virus infection she contracted at 21 weeks could have harmed her unborn child.

But Amado isn’t Brazilian. She lives on the volcanic archipelago of Cape Verde, 570 km (350 miles) west of Senegal, and is one of 100 pregnant women in the capital of Praia who have contracted Zika there.

Their fears, and those of West African authorities seeking to prepare the region’s defenses, are shared by global health experts who say it could have unknown consequences in countries ill-equipped for another public health emergency following the Ebola epidemic.

Zika, a mosquito-borne virus, was first identified by two Scots, virologist George Dick and entomologist Alexander Haddow, in a forest near Entebbe in Uganda in 1947.

The disease itself is mild and 80 percent of those infected do not feel ill, but it has shot to the top of the global health agenda after an outbreak in Brazil was suspected of causing a spike in birth defects.

And now, nearly 70 years after its discovery in mainland Africa, it is threatening to return to its roots – this time apparently in a changed form causing large-scale outbreaks.

“Cape Verde has historical links with Brazil and it seems very likely it has got there from Brazil,” said Nick Beeching of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, a Zika expert for the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

According to new data from Cape Verde’s health ministry, more than 7,000 cases of Zika have been recorded in the country since the beginning of the epidemic in October 2015, with heavier than normal rains last summer boosting mosquito numbers.

Beeching believes it is highly probable Zika will soon be back on the African mainland, thanks to regular flight connections from the Atlantic islands, potentially triggering a new chain of transmission.

Regional health officials told Reuters they were most worried about Zika being exported to Senegal or Guinea Bissau, which shares the same Portuguese heritage as Cape Verde.

A regional meeting on Zika took place in Dakar on Feb. 9, with African and Western partners discussing preparations for possible imported cases, according to officials.

Abdoulaye Bousso, the coordinator of the health emergency operations centre in Senegal, said his country had an active surveillance programme with several “sentinel sites” being established as early warning points for an outbreak.

“We do not have cases in the country currently but the risk is there,” he said.

MANY MOSQUITOES

Africa is fertile ground for Zika. Researchers have found more than 20 different mosquito species carrying the virus there, although whether they all transmit the disease effectively to humans is unclear.

Ultimately, how much damage Zika may cause on this vast continent will depend on the level of immunity among African populations – and that hinges, crucially, on the extent to which Zika’s genetic make-up has mutated on its round-the-world trip.

A warning from World Health Organization experts in a paper published online on Feb. 9 that the virus “appears to have changed in character” is heightening concerns.

The exact nature of the shift has yet to be unravelled but Mary Kay Kindhauser and colleagues said Zika had altered as it moved through Asia – from an infection causing limited cases of mild illness to one leading to large outbreaks and, from 2013 onwards, linked to babies born with neurological disorders and abnormally small heads.

Jimmy Whitworth, a British-based researcher now at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who studied Zika in Uganda back when it was still a “virological curiosity”, said the ground was shifting and the risks increasing.

“There are a few genetic differences between the African and Asian lineages, and it looks like the Asian lineages may be better able to transmit and flourish in a human population,” he told Reuters.

What this means on the ground is uncertain. In theory, there may be some cross-protection between different Zika strains, which could protect Africans from the latest version.

But Beeching noted that dengue fever, a closely related mosquito-borne virus, had four recognised strains and there was only limited and temporary cross-protection between them. “We just don’t know how Zika will spread if it gets to Africa,” he said.

Another big question is why there is no apparent link in Africa between Zika and birth defects, since the continent has been home to sporadic cases of Zika for decades, if not centuries or millennia.

It may be that any past cases of small heads in newborns, known as microcephaly, or of the neurological condition Guillain-Barre syndrome may have been missed in Africa given its limited healthcare infrastructure.

But Whitworth hopes to go back and take a retrospective look, since countries including Malawi, Kenya and Uganda have good population records, head measurement data and serum banks that should make checks possible.

Back in Cape Verde’s Central Hospital in Praia, clinical director Maria do Ceu says there is so far no evidence from scans of any microcephaly among the country’s infected mothers-to-be, who are due to deliver their first babies this month.

Amado is optimistic. “The doctor encouraged me to do morphological ultrasound and told me that I am okay,” she said. “It happened suddenly. I started having blotchy skin and then I went to the maternity ward. I was followed up and thank God everything is fine.”

South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters party have walked out of Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation address in the latest attack on the embattled president.

In chaotic scenes in parliament, EFF lawmakers shouted down the speaker for more than an hour before obeying her order to either allow the president to deliver his address or to leave the chamber.

“Zuma is no longer a president that deserves the respect from anyone,” the EFF leader, Julius Malema, yelled as Zuma sat impassively at the podium.

“He has stolen from us, he has corrupted the economy of South Africa, he has made this country a joke and after that, he has laughed at us.”

The EFF lawmakers, dressed in their regular uniform of red workers’ overalls and red hard hats, then left the chamber.

Jacob Zuma, centre, was trying to give his state of the nation address in parliament when the EFF walked out. Photograph: EPA

The party, which supports land redistribution without compensation and nationalisation of mines, was formed by Malema, former leader of the ANC Youth League, in 2013 and has become an effective critic of Zuma’s government.

The Japanese government plans to allocate development assistance for some 60 projects in African countries, centering on infrastructure development but also covering fields as diverse as agriculture and health care, a government source said Thursday.

The plan has been formulated in preparation for the sixth Tokyo International Conference on African Development, which Japan co-sponsors with the United Nations and the African Union, scheduled to be held in Nairobi in August. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is expected to announce the assistance at TICAD, the source said.

The commitment is partly to counter China, which in recent years has stepped up its presence in the continent with massive aid packages, while also aimed at gaining support from African countries for Japan’s bid to be a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, the source said.

According to the source, Tokyo considers Africa the world’s last major growth market and aims to offer high-quality, safety-focused infrastructure technology as an alternative to China’s.

The government decided in July to focus on development in three regions of Africa — areas surrounding Kenya’s Mombasa port and Nacala port in northern Mozambique, as well as Cote d’Ivoire and surrounding West African nations.

Funding has been earmarked for the about 60 projects in all, many involving infrastructure including ports and road networks. The total amount of assistance will be worked out later, though.

The projects also include the development of natural gas extraction in Mozambique and an urban transport network for Nairobi.

A model project will be launched in Zambia to distribute medical testing equipment in light of the difficulties of dealing with infectious diseases such as the Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus.

An Africa-wide exchange student program with Japan and a microloan system to channel funds to capital-strapped farmers are also on the table, the source said.

Tokyo will now set about negotiating the scale of the assistance with each recipient country, according to the source.

The sixth TICAD, scheduled to run over Aug. 27 and 28, will be the first to be held within Africa. It has previously been held in Japan every five years since 1993, but will now be held every three years.

Observers say the new legislation is likely to ensure that the scheme continues even after Mr Obama leaves the White House in 2017.

Image copyrightAFP

Image caption
Many Nigerians are forced to rely on generators for their electricity supply

The scheme has set itself the long-term target of doubling electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa.

The legislation would “improve the lives of millions in sub-Saharan Africa by helping to reduce reliance on charcoal and other toxic fuel sources that produce fumes that kill more than HIV/Aids and malaria combined,” said House Foreign Affairs committee chairman Ed Royce, a long-time supporter of the initiative.

It would also “promote the development of affordable and reliable energy”, he added, in a statement on Monday.

Management consultant firm McKinsey estimates that it will cost $835bn (£575bn) to connect the entire continent’s population to electricity by 2030.

Aside from the US government, African governments, development partners, and the private sector are all involved in the Power Africa scheme.

The US government has made financial commitments of $7bn to support the scheme, which it says in turn has drawn a further $43bn in investment pledged from other public and private partners.

Zika fever is a mosquito-borne viral disease caused by the Zika virus which is suspected of leading to the birth of deformed babies. The virus is transmitted to humans when an infected Aedes mosquito stings a person. Direct human to human transmission through sexhas also been reported.

The virus has spread to 23 countries in the South American region. Brazil has been the hardest hit with over 3700. Although the outbreak in Brazil has received the most attention, the virus has also since spread beyond the region to the Cape Verde Islands, which are off the coast of Senegal but are not part of the African mainland, Samoa and Tonga.

There are global attempts underway to stop the spread of the virus. It has been declared an international emergency by the World Health Organisation and the US’s Centre for Disease Control has put out six travel alerts so far.

There are several reasons Africa is least prepared to deal with an outbreak of the Zika virus. This includes the limited laboratory capacity and a lack of experts and funding.

Limited lab capacity

Firstly, the laboratory capacity to test for the virus is limited. Although the clinical features of the Zika virus are known, these are non-specific. This means other known diseases, such as malaria, have some – though of course not all – of the same signs and symptoms.

That Zika may appear like several other diseases makes laboratory testing for the virus imperative. But there are no widely available tests. This is unlike diseases or infections such as malaria and HIV/AIDS that have clinically tested and approved commercial laboratory tests or reagents.

Although inferior laboratories are not unique to Africa, in high income countries this challenge is mitigated by sending the tests to a national laboratory. For example in the US samples obtained from suspected Zika cases are now being sent to the Centre for Disease Control. In the UK the agency responsible is Public Health England’s Rare and Imported Pathogens Laboratory RIPL.

Although South Africa has the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, which could manage these tests in a standardised manner, several other countries do not have this capacity. Examples of the few comparable laboratories outside of South Africa are the Uganda Virus Research Institute and the Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases at Redeemers University in Nigeria. But much of the continent does not have the infrastructural and human capacity to diagnose Zika.

A lack of experts

Facilities are not the only challenge. There is also a lack of proactive national and regional health experts to guide the response in case of any outbreak. This is a gap that needs urgent attention, not only for the Zika virus but also to deal with emerging and re-emerging infections.

There is much to learn from the Ebola epidemic which swept through several countries in West Africa in 2014 and 2015.

To effectively deal with the Ebola outbreak, international cooperation and collaboration was vital. Affected national governments, neighbouring nations and both local and international funders all came together to stem the spread of disease. For instance, Uganda and South Africa sent several teams of health workers to Liberia and Sierra Leone. There was significant capacity building which would not have taken place had this manpower not been available.

The international collaboration continues in terms of searching for a vaccine as well as the treatment and care of Ebola patients. We have learned that fragile health systems are more susceptible to infectious diseases epidemics.

Another challenge which the Ebola outbreak should teach Africa is that in terms of a disease spreading, no country is an island. While there may not be local transmission of Zika in a particular country, there is no guarantee that a country will not have individuals who travel to or come into it carrying the disease.

Unlike Ebola where direct human to human transmission through droplets was a concern, it is note that easy to transmit the Zika infection. The Aedes mosquito is needed as an intermediary or sexual intercourse must occur between an infected person and a susceptible individual. Therefore the border control needs for Ebola are more stringent than Zika. A Zika infected individual who travels from one country is more at individual risk of not being diagnosed and receiving appropriate care than of transmitting the infection.

No unified body

Unlike in the US, there is not a unified body of health experts on the continent. The available regional bodies such as the West African College of Physicians and the soon to be launched College of Physicians of East, Central and Southern Africa have their jobs cut out already to lead in the health sector.

The World Health Organisation’s African Regional Office, unlike its Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), does not proclaim advisories and guidelines apart from those decided at headquarters in Geneva.

As early as July 2013, the African Union Summit identified the need for an African centre for disease control modelled on the on the in the US. Among its responsibilities would be surveillance and response, which would include an emergency operations centre. Although the centre has been launched, it has yet to handle its first epidemic. Until the African centre for disease control is fully active, there is no comparable entity for Africa.

The re-emergence of diseases such as Zika calls for African states and experts, as well as the international community, to join forces to build the continent’s disease response capacities.

Adamson S. Muula: Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Malawi

“They didn’t tell us at the end of this job, you people will get crazy,” said

Matthew Kruah,

a companion in his daily drinking and drug abuse who buried his father during his own time on the graveyard crews.

Ebola killed some 11,000 West Africans, but it also left survivors to grieve in an area with very few mental-health professionals, and where few can afford to see one in any case.

Liberia has just one psychiatrist for a population of four million, according to the health ministry. Sierra Leone, home to seven million, also has only one. The mental-health wing of the Liberian health ministry has just two staffers on payroll.

It is an unsettling postscript to an epidemic that, for all its horrors, was meant to leave behind an army of newly trained health workers. Instead, large numbers of that crew are too shaken to work.

“They all lost somebody close to them,” said

Janice Cooper,

project lead for the nonprofit Carter Center’s mental-health program in Liberia, which is looking to put hospital staff through basic mental-health crash courses.

Even before Ebola, Liberia and Sierra Leone numbered among the world’s most traumatized nations, both recovering from civil war. Fourteen years of conflict in Liberia left 250,000 dead and many survivors homeless. A 2011 study in Liberia’s Nimba County found 40% of its 500,000 people exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Many fought in the war as child soldiers, including Messrs. Dingay and Kruah. The two left school early, leaving them barely literate.

When work burying Ebola victims became available, the two saw it as possibly their only chance to secure a salaried job. They frittered away the money as quickly as it came.

“We were thinking, after this job, we can die, too,” said Mr. Dingay. “So we just spend the money.”

A year later, Mr. Kruah finds it difficult to eat or focus. Mr. Dingay said he can’t shake the image of his daughter in the days before she died.

Neighbors, repulsed by the unusual, macabre trade they plied, have turned “burial boys” into an insult.

“That’s that burial team,” teased a man pushing a wheelbarrow past the porch where they spent a recent afternoon.

“Go away!” one of the burial men shot back.

Liberia—its economy wrecked, its government broke and its people exhausted— can hardly attend to these wounds. Virtually no clinic in the country stocks antidepressants. Liberia’s only mental-health pharmacist,

Joseph Quoi,

has never found a reliable source, so he often runs out. “Mental health has fallen by the wayside,” he said.

There are just 72 hospital beds in Liberia reserved for mental-health patients. About 160 hospital staff have psychosocial training, such as how to spot problems like PTSD. As the hospital system collapsed here last year, half turned to roles that don’t use those skills. Many are probably traumatized as well.

“This is just abnormal,” said

Angie Tarr-Nyakoon,

the director of the government’s mental-health unit. “How are we going to handle it?”

The answer, for many Liberians: self-medication with alcohol and heroin. The government has no capacity to treat addiction. There are only 15 beds for addicts in a country where bars frequently start selling beer and liquor before noon.

From August 2014 to the following March, Messrs. Dingay and Kruah spent days lumbering into the homes of neighbors they knew, to lift their remains up from the blood, sweat and vomit in which they died. Sometime after burying their 50th body in the September heat, they began drinking after work.

Soon they were drinking before work, too. Often, they were drunk, they said, while they put on their elaborate, head-to-toe biohazard suits—a meticulous process, in which a single slip-up can allow the Ebola virus to penetrate. Mr. Dingay wonders if he missed a step and somehow carried the virus home.

In October, his daughter died. “Some people started saying I’m playing with this virus so I’m the one that gave it to her,” he said. “I dream about her. When I’m sitting, eating, I can picture her face.”

A few months later, the two men traded their homes for the churchyard. The pastor tries to cure them with daily prayer. That is about the only place for them to go, their burial-team supervisor,

John D. Johnson,

figured.

“I really want to see them doing better,” said Mr. Johnson, who admits to his own problems: “If I don’t drink, I will have some kind of sleepless night.”